Reviews for our Barosaurus preprint

September 24, 2013

I woke up this morning to find its third substantial review waiting for me.

That means that this paper has now accumulated as much useful feedback in the twenty-seven hours since I submitted it as any previous submission I’ve ever made.

Taylor and Wedel (2013b: figure 7).Barosaurus lentus holotype YPM 429, Vertebra S (C?12). Left column from top to bottom: dorsal, right lateral and ventral views; right column: anterior view. Inset shows displaced fragment of broken prezygapophysis. Note the narrow span across the parapophyses in ventral view, and the lack of damage to the ventral surface of the centrum which would indicate transverse crushing.

It’s worth reviewing the timeline here:

Monday 23rd September, 1:19 am: I completed the submission process.

7:03 am: the preprint was published. It took less than six hours.

10:52 am: received a careful, detailed review from Emanuel Tschopp. It took less than four hours from publication, and so of course less than ten from submission.

About 5:00 pm: received a second review, this one from Mark Robinson. (I don’t know the exact time because PeerJ’s page doesn’t show an actual timestamp, just “21 hours ago”.)

Tuesday 24th September, about 4:00 am: received a third review, this from ceratopsian-jockey and open-science guru Andy Farke.

Total time from submission to receiving three substantial reviews: about 27 hours.

It’s worth contrasting that with the times taken to get from submission to the receipt of reviews — usually only two of them — when going through the traditional journal route. Here are a few of mine:

Diplodocoid phylogenetic nomenclature at the Journal of Paleontology, 2004-5 (the first reviews I ever received): three months and 14 days.

Trivial correction to the Brachiosaurus revision at the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2010: five months and 11 days, bizarrely for a half-page paper.

Despite the wide variations in submission-to-review time at these journals, it’s clear that you can expect to wait at least a month before getting any feedback at all on your submission at traditional journals. Even PeerJ took 19 days to get the reviews of our neck-anatomy paper back to us.

So I am now pretty such sold on the pre-printing route. As well as getting this early version of the paper out there early so that other palaeontologists can benefit from it (and so that we can’t be pre-emptively plagiarised), issuing a preprint has meant that we’ve got really useful feedback very quickly.

I highly recommend this route.

By the way, in case anyone’s wondering, PeerJ Preprints is not only for manuscripts that are destined for PeerJ proper. They’re perfectly happy for you to use their service as a place to gather feedback for your work before submitting it elsewhere. So even if your work is destined for, say, JVP, there’s a lot to be gained by preprinting it first.

15 Responses to “Reviews for our Barosaurus preprint”

Doesn’t it feel like this is the way things should be? The LIBRE platform was precisely designed to facilitate formal author-guided open peer review to manuscripts “published” (as in made public) anywhere: preprint archives, institutional repositories and even personal websites and blogs. Open reviews become an integral part of the manuscript that can be updated and submitted to any journal. As Mike demonstrates it’s free and there are only benefits involved for researchers and the scientific quality in general.

I know there are differences between fields, but I have a joint paper that’s been in submission for 10 months (to a high-quality society journal), and the (very helpful and friendly) editor explained this was because there was difficulty finding a referee who would do a proper review. And 10 months is not terribly unusual in mathematics…

We don’t say that Barosaurus is probably a brachiosaur. There’s loads of good evidence that it’s a diplodocine, and phylogenetic analyses have been unanimous on that point.

What we say is that aspects of Vertebra R of the holotype — when considered in isolation, and before considering damage — resemble what you’d expect to see in a brachiosaur. The resemblance is real, but as the paper explains illusory.

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